At a gala party, waiter Axel meets a woman and has sex with her in the toilet—where he is caught by his girlfriend Doro who thus decides to throw him out of their apartment. Now without a job and residence, Axel meets the vegetarian gay man Norbert and accepts to stay in his apartment. Norbert has a crush on Axel. When Doro finds out she is pregnant, she tracks Axel and makes up with him. After their wedding, Axel is back in her apartment, but randomly meets an ex-girlfriend, Elke, and decides to have sex with her in Norbert's apartment, while Norbert is persuaded to go with his friends to the cinemas for two hours. However, Elke gives Axel "bull power", a spray that increases the potency, but just randomly gives them hallucinations. When Doro goes into labor, Norbert takes her to the hospital. After the birth, Doro and Axel are again in a feud, while Norbert comforts him.
"Maybe... Maybe Not" once again seems to support the hypothesis that German humor is problematic and a little bit forced—which didn't hinder it in becoming the 3rd highest grossing film at the German box office, where it sold 6,600,000 tickets, and helped catapult its lead actor Til Schweiger into a local superstar. Back in the day, the movie caused quite a hype due to its theme of gay and straight men having a friendship, but from today's perspective, a big deal of that feature became normal in movies and TV shows, and thus the movie doesn't stand out anymore. The director Sonke Wortmann crafts a rather routine comedy about relationships, with only intermittently reaching a few truly funny jokes. It derives humor from awkward situations, but the problem is in the staged, contrived paths which lead up to them and don't feel like the characters got there naturally—for instance, the protagonist Axel goes back to the apartment of his ex-girlfriend Doro, and watches slides of her in the living room with his gay roommate Norbert, who suddenly tells him it's hot and thus he has to take off his clothes. Besides the peculiarly calm reaction with which Axel just accepts that a naked man sits next to him on the couch, just like that, for no reason at all, upon hearing that Doro is entering the apartment, Axel panics and hides the naked Norbert in the closet. Yes, it's all a set-up to have Doro think Axel is hiding a woman and having an affair, but wouldn't it have made much more sense that Axel would just tell Norbert to put his clothes on and simply tell Doro that he is just his friend hanging around with him? After 50 minutes, the story loses its course and feels kind of lost, but it does have a funny sequence where Axel's fling Elke gives them both an aphrodisiac spray, which just gives them wacky hallucinations, as Axel imagines seeing a turkey. Too chaotic, with several 'rough' and dumb jokes (Norbert imagining he is pregnant), yet it does display a few interesting observations about human relationships.
Grade:++
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